“Ahem!” said the Mouse, with an important air, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Charles Robinson, 1907 From Threepenny Review: It may be that Carroll’s tale has deeper roots in the human psyche than its nursery reputation might suggest. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not...

by Madhavi Menon Surprisingly, queer theorists have rarely encountered Shakespeare. Not because they are badly-read or have blinkers on, but because of a deep belief that Shakespeare existed “before” the days of queer theory, and so it would be anachronistic to put the one in conversation with the other....

by Amanda Sigler On Bloomsday—June 16th—scholars from around the world gather together to celebrate the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place. Boasting a scandalous history, Joyce’s novel is famous for the controversy it caused when it was serialized in the Little Review, a New York magazine that dared...

by Thomas Travisano The poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was once considered a comparatively isolated figure. Because she shunned labels and avoided becoming identified with well-publicized literary movements, she was once considered—as David Kalstone wrote in 1977— a “hard to ‘place.’” However, as her posthumous fame has grown and...

Graffiti art by Banksy, near Ikea Croydon From Boston Review: Every Sunday morning I spend a few hours with the colossal edition of the New York Times and its tendency to sum up because I don’t want to see the week coming; I’d rather watch it going. One Sunday...

From the cover of The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon, 1964 by Joanna Freer Over the years Thomas Pynchon has gained a reputation as a writer with strong humanist principles. His representations of the suffering of the South-West African Herero under the genocidal German imperial regime are particularly notable...

Allen Ginsberg dressed up for working at his Market Research job, Berkely, 1954, Allen Ginsberg Project by Joe Linker When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what...

by Judie Newman The later Bellow’s reputation as a neoconservative has obscured the centrality of his early enthusiasm for Trotskyism to his life and writings. The 2010 publication of a selection of his letters opens with Saul Bellow aged 17 writing to Yetta Barshevsky, a fellow high school student...

by Elif Batuman Let’s say you’re writing a book. Every day you get up and think about it and work on it and change it. Then, at some more-or-less arbitrary point (I didn’t realize before I published a book how arbitrary this point is), it’s taken away from you...

From Granta: Never return to the places where you’ve been happy, my father always said. Ever since I started writing fiction, I’ve crafted not-always-happy stories about the country of my overwhelmingly happy childhood. It was no Utopia, of course, especially in the economic scramble after the fall of Soviet...

by Martin Paul Eve The two, alternate titles proposed for my recent work are “The F Word” and “Whose Line is it Anyway?” The word in question is Foucault, as in Michel, and the “Line” is Pynchon’s, as in Mason & Dixon. The cursory glances that have been afforded...

If duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.

I’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.

If duende, the source of inspiration that Lorca sets out to champion in his essay at the expense of the Muse, is “in sum, the spirit of the earth”, a force linking body and soil through a struggle akin to death, then the Muse is a force that speaks to the head and inspires art that is, in the words’ most negative senses, cerebral and high-minded.

I’ve been writing a more or less monthly memoir of my life in the sixties and seventies when I lived with Doris Lessing, and my continuing relationship with her until her death last year at 94. It is also an ongoing portrait of my incurable cancer.